Whether diamonds and other precious stones grow again after three or four years, in the same places where they have been digged out? which runneth pure balsam?

Whether there be a fountain in Sumatra

Whether in the Island of Sambrero there be

found a vegetable with a worm for its root, diminishing more and more, according as the tree groweth in greatness?

What ground there may be for that relation concerning horns taking root and growing

assumption. The preliminary to its suc- | raries, and even for his immediate succescessful operation was the compilation of sors, to see this. They did not in fact what he called a "natural history;" that perceive any impossibility in a scheme for is, an exhaustive catalogue of all natural tabulating the universe. On the contrary, phenomena, constituting a vast repository they looked forward confidently to the time of materials for induction. Until this when it should be accomplished. The should be accomplished, he laid down preparation of a universal history of nadogmatically that no progress worthy the ture was a purpose always present to the human race was possible,* and declared minds of the founders of the Royal Sothe history without the method to be infi- ciety, and some preliminary steps towards nitely more serviceable to science than its execution were even attempted by the method without the history. The them. Bishop Sprat* has left on record assumption was that the infinite complex- the "queries and directions, what things ity of visible and sensible objects are are needful to be observed," composed formed by the varying combinations of a with this view. Some of these enquiries limited number of simple natures" (such sound, to our instructed ears, rather comas heat, weight, color, etc.), just as words ical. We take the following specimens: and sentences in endless diversity are compounded out of a few elementary signs. And as, by learning six-andtwenty letters, we get at the secret of written language, so we have only to construct a complete alphabet of nature, in order to read her riddles with ease and certainty. Thus, the second step in the process was nothing less than to frame a synopsis of all the modes of action in the universe.§ The peculiar efficacy of the "exclusiva" now becomes apparent. All "natures save one, being excluded, by a series of skilful experiments, from casual connection with the phenomenon under investigation, the residual element is negatively, but conclusively, proved to be the "true cause or form" sought for. It was from this special invention, and not from the general application of inductive rules, that Bacon's "organ " derived its peculiar efficacy. This was the new art of discovery likened by him to a pair of compasses, armed with which the least skilful hand might be guided to define a perfect circle. This was the universal nostrum the elixir vitæ of science which had the one drawback common to all methods professing to transcend nature, that its operation was clogged with an impossible condition. It is easy enough for us, from our present point of view, to see that the method of exclusions was tainted with a logical vice. It implied a petitio principii; it presupposed, while promising to impart, universal knowledge. It was not so easy-it was perhaps impossible for Bacon, for his contempo

66

about Goa?

Whether there be a tree in Mexico that

yields water, wine, vinegar, oyl, milk, honey, wax, thread, and needles?

The answer to this last query, furnished to them by one of their "merchants of light," was, that "the Cokos Tree yields all this and more."

The disproportionate importance attached to this species of information by the revivers of science is curiously illustrated by the fact, that the funds of the Royal Society having been exhausted in printing Willughby's" History of Fishes," they were obliged to decline undertaking the publication of Newton's "Principia. Indeed one of their most ingenious members was as fully convinced as Bacon had been, that the true highway to that knowledge which is power lay in this direction. Of this remarkable person it is now time to give some account.

Robert Hooke was born at Freshwater, in the Isle of Wight, July 18, 1635. Like Newton, he was a sickly child, and like Newton too, his early years were distinguished and diverted by his singular mechanical ingenuity. He has left it on record that, having seen an old brass clock taken to pieces, he succeeded in constructing, in imitation of it, a wooden

But we anticipate our narrative. The foundation of the Royal Society opened to him the road to fortune and fame. Having raised his reputation by an able paper on capillary attraction, his name was placed on the first list of fellows, and on November 12, 1662, he was unanimously elected curator of experiments, "with the thanks of the Society ordered to Mr. Boyle for dispensing with him for their use."

late the movement of watches. For this | versies happier than his choice of occa important invention his friends endeav- sions for them. His tone in argument ored to procure him a patent, which he, was at all times dictatorial, and under however, refused, being dissatisfied with excitement it was apt to become shrill. the terms proposed; and it thus remained By his arrogance, he exasperated his adundivulged, and by many disbelieved in. versaries; by his irritability, he prejuBut when, in 1675, Huyghens published, diced his cause. Thus, when (as not in the Journal des Savants, his discovery unfrequently happened) he was in the of spiral watchsprings, Hooke indig- right, he roused animosity; when he was nantly claimed it as his own, incidentally in the wrong, he incurred discredit. attacking Oldenburg, then secretary of the Royal Society, with whom he was never on very civil terms. A sharp paper conflict ensued, Hooke (quite unjustifiably) accusing Oldenburg of "trafficking in intelligence," and Oldenburg retaliating with the better-founded assertion that Hooke's “pendulum-watches " could never be got to go; while Huyghens, who might well disdain to wrangle over so small a prize, stood aloof, and let the controversy rage. Hooke's priority, as regards the principle, is unquestion able; but it is equally unquestionable that the modification introduced by Huyghens first brought the improved timepieces into general use. That modification was nothing more than the coiling into a spiral of a spring which, in Hooke's design, had remained straight. So fine is the line drawn between failure and

success.

and it was not until three years before his death that, conforming at last to the fashion of his time, he cut it off, and substituted a periwig. Up to the age of sixteen, he was said to have been straight, and he himself attributed his deformity to his excessive use when young of "incurvating exercises," such as working with a turning-lathe. Waller, his earliest biographer, tells us :

He had at this time entered on his twenty-ninth year, and had within him a spirit of fire, not indeed "grossly," but most inadequately "clad' in the corporeal "dimension" of his species. Pepys, who knew him well and rated him high, notes in his "Diary," that "Mr. Hooke is the most, and promises the least, of any man in the world that ever I saw." His personal appearance, indeed, was to the last degree deplorable. His figure was crooked, his limbs shrunkThe history of this invention is, in en and emaciated, his aspect meagre, his brief, the history of Hooke's life. He carriage stooping. He wore his hair, was a man whose brilliant qualities were which was of a dark brown color, hanging neutralized one by the other. His ex-in long dishevelled locks over his face, traordinary ingenuity was marred by his equally extraordinary versatility. His thoughts pursued each other in a rapid succession of vivid and original suggestions; but they found no halting-place on the way. He received them with rapture, but they wearied him if they stayed too long. He welcomed all, but made none his friend. He wanted that laborious passion of perfection, apart from which the progeny of invention is but a sterile brood. His mind was like a telescope without clockwork, which shows the moving host of heaven, but cannot fix or observe any individual star. Thus, his discoveries and investigations were usually abandoned or postponed when on the point of completion. It was not until some other enquirer, less discursive or more discreet, added the finishing touches still wanting, that he became sensible of the full value of what he had neglected, and, with loud vociferations, stood on the highway of learning, crying "Stop thief!" to the whole scientific world. Nor was his manner of conducting these contro

ingenious look whilst younger; his nose but His eyes were gray and full, with a sharp, thin, of a moderate height and length; his mouth meanly wide, and upper lip thin; his chin sharp and forehead large; his head of a middle size. . . . He went stooping and very fast, having but a light body to carry, and a great deal of spirits and activity, especially in his youth. He was of an active, restless, indefatigable genius even almost to the last, and always slept little to his death, seldom going morning, and seldomer to bed, oftener conto sleep till two, three or four o'clock in the tinuing his studies all night, and taking a short nap in the day. His temper was melancholy, mistrustful, and jealous, which more increased upon him with his years. He had a pierc⚫

The extreme parsimony, which the necessities of his early life had rendered a virtue, degenerated, as years went on, into a weakness if not into a vice. After his death, a large iron chest, which it appeared by evident signs had lain undisturbed for above thirty years, was discovered in his lodgings, and on being opened was found to contain several thousand pounds in gold and silver, accumulated by him in the lucrative employment of surveyor for the rebuilding of the city after the fire of September 3, 1666. Thus he condemned himself to a life of sordid privation, while relegating to dust and cobwebs a treasure which he was too penurious to spend, and too busy even to enjoy the miser's pleasure of counting.

me

This insensible change of front, as regards scientific method, is very clearly discernible in Hooke's writings. He began life with hopes as large as and more Even before he left Oxford, he had prodefined than those of Bacon himself. vided himself with what he called a chanical algebra," which he regarded as an infallible guide to invention. This he afterwards expanded into an elaborate engine of discovery, competent, as he believed, to construct with certainty and swiftness an edifice of knowledge, heretofore unmatched for vastness and durability. The scheme, like all his more ambitious designs, remained incomplete, or, at most, was completed only in the mind of its author; and the tract in which he describes it breaks off just as the momentous secret is about to be disclosed.

Whether it was that the difficulties in the

way became more clear to him as he ad-
vanced, and that he lost faith in his own
means of removing them, or whether it
was that his jealousy of disclosure over-
balanced, at the critical moment, his ap-
petite for fame, we shall never know.
We do know, however, enough to show
us that the revelation would have been
valuable only as a gratification of our
curiosity, and as throwing a singular light
of experimental science.
on the visions which haunted the morning

The following extract from his essay on "The Present State of Natural Phil

method. He attempted, as will be seen, to come to closer quarters with the prob lem than Bacon had done, and succeeded thereby in more clearly defining its insolubility.

It is difficult to convey an adequate idea of the multifarious and unceasing activity of Hooke's intellectual life during the forty years of his connection with the Royal Society. It reflected the boundless but fortuitous curiosity of an age which had indeed realized the bold vaunt of its herald, by leaving the pillars of Hercules of ancient lore far behind; but now found itself, like Ulysses of old, embarked on a trackless ocean without any sure pilotage to the happy isles of renovated science. Hooke and his contemporaries were inflamed with the unmeasured hopes and vast ambition of the Verulamian prophe-osophy" briefly exposes his ideal of a cies; but they began to be more and more conscious that the Verulamian method was but as the "golden path_of_rays leading to the setting sun. They were haunted by the idea that nature was to be interrogated, not progressively or by instalments, but once for all, by a supreme inductive effort, and they could not wholly relinquish the hope that they were destined to witness its consummation. They had been told to expand their souls to the measure of the universe, and they were unwilling to confess their inadequacy to the effort required of them. They were like men groping in the darkness for a door which they had but to throw wide, in order to find themselves in the full blaze of daylight; and they learned with reluctance that only by painful and prolonged exertions could they expect to open a chink here and there for a ray of twilight to enter.

Some other kind of art for inquiry [he writes]* than what hath been hitherto made use of, must be discovered; the intellect is not to be suffered to act without its helps, but is continually to be assisted by some method or its actions, so as that it shall not be able to engine, which shall be as a guide to regulate act amiss. Of this engine, no man except the incomparable Verulam hath had any thoughts, and he indeed hath promoted it to a very good pitch; but there is yet somewhat more to be added, which he seemed to want time to complete. By this, as by that art of Algebra in Geometry, 'twill be very easy to proceed in any natural inquiry, regularly and certainly: and indeed it may not improperly be called a Philosophical Algebra, or an art of directing the mind in the search after philosophical truths.

The first part only of this "Algebra of

• Posthumous Works, p. 6.

Discovery," "containing the manner of stall, no substance, quality, or accident is preparing the mind, and furnishing it with excluded. No natural process, no comfit materials to work on," was written; the mercial product, but has its separate second, which should have set forth "the"history." The despised handicraftsrules and methods of proceeding and op- man is to yield up his obscure secrets as erating with this so collected and qualified well as the scientific artisan. A Dollond supellex," remained in embryo. Hooke, or a Steinheil is not more stimulating to like Bacon, set out with a classification of the catholic curiosity of the natural histhe errors incidental to humanity in its torian than a Quince, a Bottom, or a Snug. actual condition; but his mode of rectify. Yet all this encyclopædic mass of inforing them was a more patient and practical mation, infinite in its subject, indefinite process than the " expurgation of the in its extent, expansive in its nature, intellect," preached by the philosophic Hooke tells us he "has very good reason chancellor. The senses are to be helped, to believe may be contained in much he tells us, by skilfully constructed instru- fewer words than the writings of divers ments, whereby their sphere of action single authors!"* This would, indeed, may be enlarged, and their untutored im- have been to imprison the liberated genius pressions brought to the test of exact of knowledge within narrower limits than measurement and rigid calculation. The those of Aristotelian tradition. The seal, report of one sense must be corrected by however, was broken; the vase was alcomparison with that of the others, until ready at the bottom of the sea, and it only "sensation is reduced to a standard," and remained to guide and propitiate a power the mind is gradually informed with true which it was no longer possible to confine. notions of "things, as they are part of, and actors or patients in the universe, not only as they have this or that peculiar relation or influence on our own senses or selves."

The "Philosophical History," of which Hooke traced the gigantic plan, would, in fact, have included what we now understand as the whole body of inductive science, with a considerable margin of The next step in the "preparation heterogeneous material, difficult of classiconsisted in the compilation of a "philo-fication, and more curious, perhaps, than sophical history," comprising

a brief and plain account of a great store of choice and significant natural and artificial operations, actions, and effects, ranged in a convenient order, and interwoven here and there with some short hints of accidental remarks or theories, of corresponding or disagreeing received opinions, of doubts and queries, and the like; and indeed until this repository be pretty well stored with choice and sound materials, the work of raising new axioms or theories is not to be attempted, lest

beginning without materials the whole design be given over in the middle.*

useful. It would have included not only an enumeration of all possible phenomena, but the knowledge of the laws by which they are governed, and the causes by which they are produced. The natural historian was to be "knowing in hypotheses," that he might set his facts in plausible sequence of cause and effect; he was to be a skilled mechanician, and an able mathematician, that he might investigate their relations by experiment, lations by calculation. Hooke's " and deduce the consequences of such rehelps of discovery" are but another form of The matter of such a history, he says Bacon's "prerogative instances; " but it further, is no less than the world; "for is significant that in the later system they there is no body or operation in the uni- appear in the preparatory stage, while in verse that is not some way or other to be the earlier they form an integral part of the taken notice of in this great work." And "Organum" itself. The impossible was, the programme which he proceeds to lay in fact, relegated to a distant future, while down in no way belies his promise. Fire, the possible took possession of the presair, earth, and water; light and darkness, ent. The "raising of axioms," and the heat and cold, gravity and levity, all the discovery of "forms," which were sup"prime sensible qualities" of nature, find posed to constitute the true business of each its place in this stupendous mag- the philosopher, were postponed in favor azine of knowledge. From ether to an- of the more modest task of setting facts thracite, from a man to a mite or a mush-in order, and connecting them by means room, from dreams and influences to arts of ideas. Thus natural philosophy, in the and sciences, from the starry firmament recondite sense in which it was underto the costermonger's cart or the cobbler's stood by the theorists of the seventeenth

Posthumous Works, p. 18.

Posthumous Works, p. 21.